As an old country saying puts it, “Money is like manure – it does no good unless you spread it around.”

Yet, America’s corporate and political leaders have intentionally been shoveling wealth into an ever-bigger pile for those at the top. They’ve gotten away with this by lying to the great majority, which has seen its share of America’s prosperity steadily disappear. Yes, they’ve told us, the rich are getting richer, but that’s just the natural workings of the new global economy, in which financial elites are rewarded for their exceptional talents, innovation, and bold risk-taking.

Horse dooties. The massive redistribution of America’s wealth from the many to the few is happening because the rich and their political puppets have rigged the system. Years of subsidized offshoring and downsizing, gutting labor rights, monkeywrenching the tax code, legalizing financial finagling, dismantling social programs, increasing the political dominance of corporate cash – these and other self-serving acts of the moneyed powers have created the conveyor belt that’s moving our wealth from the grassroots to the penthouses.

Not since the Gilded Age, which preceded and precipitated the Great Depression, have so few amassed so much of our nation’s riches. Having learned nothing from 1929’s devastating crash, nor from their own bank failures in 2008 that crushed our economy, the wealthiest of the wealthy fully intend to keep taking more for themselves at our expense.

Now, however, the people are onto their lies. In an October poll, two-thirds of Americans support increased taxes on millionaires, an end to corporate tax subsidies, and policies to more evenly distribute the wealth we all help create. This is rising egalitarianism shows the true American character, and it’s changing our politics – for the better.

Income and benefits for most Americans have stagnated over the past four decades despite steady economic growth.

By Salvatore Babones

Back in the “Happy Days” of the 1950s and 1960s, most young American couples graduated from high school or college, got married, and immediately bought the most expensive house they could afford. They bought their houses on credit, their cars on credit, their appliances on credit, their furniture on credit, and even their baby clothes on credit. They didn’t have credit cards, but they sure did have debt.

Those young families in the 1950s and 1960s were perfectly rational in loading up on debt. It made sense for them to borrow as much as they could because they expected paying it off to get easier and easier every year. Between 1870 and 1970 the median male U.S. income rose on average 2 percent per year. In the 1950s and 1960s it grew even faster, at around a 2.5 percent clip.

In addition to this broad income growth, any individual could count on his or her income to rise with seniority. Add in another 1-percent yearly raise tied to seniority, and a typical American man could expect his paycheck to annually grow by 3.5 percent. Over the course of a 40-year career, he could expect his wages to quadruple — even after adjusting for inflation.

It made perfect sense to follow a “borrow now and pay later when you make four times as much” plan back then.

Today, everything has changed. Median male income hasn’t just stagnated since 1970. Wages for American men have actually declined.

The Baby Boomers kept on buying and borrowing, but many of them learned that one income wasn’t enough to pay their debts. That’s why the proportion of women with children who had jobs outside the home climbed from one in three in 1975 to two in three in 2008. For a while, women saved the American Dream.

Not anymore. Over the past decade women’s participation in the labor force has maxed out. Even if more women want to work, there aren’t any new jobs for them. The situation facing today’s indebted families is bleak. Wages overall are declining. Even if a worker does get a 1-percent annual seniority raise, that’s a 50-percent increase in income over a 40-year career — nothing like the 300-percent increases previous generations experienced. The money just isn’t there.

It gets worse. Young couples now have large debts before they ever get married, often from burgeoning student loans. On top of that, young couples now have to save for their own retirement, since Social Security benefits are far lower compared to national income than they were in the 1960s and private pensions have all but disappeared. And of course ordinary people now have to pay for health care expenses that used to be covered by insurance.

Families today are drowning in debt. Yet the problem isn’t the borrowing. Young families should be able to borrow to buy houses, cars, and furniture. The problem is that income and benefits for most Americans have stagnated over the past four decades.

If today’s young couples were getting 3.5-percent annual raises, didn’t have to worry about spiralling health care expenses and college tuition, and had solid company-sponsored pension plans to supplement ever more generous Social Security payments in retirement, they would have no problem getting themselves out of debt.

That may all sound like a dream. But it’s a dream that used to be reality for the majority of Americans.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Since 1970 the U.S. economy has doubled in per capita terms, after adjusting for inflation. We have the money for everyone to live very well — twice as well as in 1970.

Young families today are struggling because the benefits of America’s economic growth over the past 40 years haven’t been shared equally. They’ve all gone to the very top. It’s time to restore some balance. It’s time to give ordinary people a nice, big, fat raise. Then they could pay their debts on their own, with pride and dignity.

Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist at the University of Sydney.

From FOX – New York: More than 20 people were reportedly arrested in a fracas outside the LaGuardia Place Citibank, after upwards of 50 demonstrators entered the bank to close their accounts.

“They were locked inside. They’re now being placed under arrest. Two individuals who were inside closing their bank accounts and then came outside were approached by an undercover cop and against their will placed under arrest simply for attempting to close their Citibank accounts in an act of peaceful protest,” one woman told spectators.

Of course, FOX was biased and did not tell the citizen’s/account-holders point of view. I don’t care if you emerged from a protest of any kind, if you have an account, you are a customer and have every right to enter the business and close your account.

This is so outrageous. The woman narrating the video was ABDUCTED from the street, for no other reason than she had been with the group choosing to close their accounts!

There is only one right thing to do now. Close you account(s) with ANY big Wall Street bank. Start with Citibank. ~ sekanblogger

New theme song for “Occupy Wall Street”?

This was recorded in 1975, so it’s not exactly written for today’s protesters, but it sure does stand the test of time.

I’ve heard or read Shawn tell about different song’s lyrics, but not this one. Maybe it was written about the Savings and Loan Scandal. The Bush family did quite well being “bailed out” way back then, over 35 years ago!

I want to mention “Reaganomics, trickle-down, and public safety, all in the same short post, so let’s talk about a “tipping point” in American history.

That point would be when Reagan ‘busted’ the Air Traffic Controller’s union. That single action began the long decline that American workers, of all varieties have been on ever since. It also marked a sharp increase in industrialists gaining more and more power over politics and government.

Reagan didn’t invent this stuff, it has always been a corporate tactic to bust unions and buy politicians, but Ronnie put such a spin on it, that it made people feel that it was okay and even damned patriotic.

Good, reliable data, charted and graphed, shows that time as the starting point of the decades long rise of corporate profits. At the same time that profits rose and the wealthy thrived, blue collar worker’s ‘real’ wages stagnated.

This entire scenario puts all in our society in an increasingly dangerous class-warfare that effects public safety. Our workers and therefor our society face a new phenomena: the “flat world”.

In conclusion; The corporate buyout of American government has been complete for may years. Fox News conservatives would have you believe that regulation (protecting the public) is the big problem causing poor job growth, but that’s just not the case.

It is just this simple; we may pay $10 per hour, foreign companies may pay $10 a day. Our wages stay at the same level or decline while theirs slowly creep up. We are on our way to being the same waged employees as China and Mexico, or we will have no jobs at all.

Our middle class is disappearing into poverty while our corporate, financial and government masters get pushed up even farther into wealth and power.

Solutions? Hmmmm….

List a few common sense ideas to save our middle/lower economic classes, and I’ll bet I can find the Fox News footage demonizing those same ideas as unpatriotic, nanny-state government that is just seeking to hinder business from growing and employing here.

Middle/lower classes of white people are flocking to conservatism, drinking their kool-aid, and sealing their fate in serfdom for generations to come.

Stupid is, as stupid does.

The proliferation of talking heads and lobbyists leading the stupid into their own demise on the many new forms of media, almost guarantees the continuing gridlock in government, and class warfare from the top on the bottom.

Any progressive or populist solutions to the nation’s problems are always crushed by ‘Captain Obvious”, that is, by the overwhelming amount of money being spent on propaganda (talk radio, Fox News, PAC’s, etc.) that plays to the average person’s most base emotions while ensuring nothing sensible and logical is ever presented to them.

Got an idea to save the middle-class?

Good luck. It’ll happen when Hell freezes over!

You unpatriotic, communist, socialistic dullard.

You’re just another “Meathead”, you hippy-type character from the ‘All In the Family’ sitcom.